Posted
by
timothyon Thursday April 10, 2014 @03:10PM
from the describe-your-conversation-with-the-inquisition dept.

Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State under George W. Bush, and defender of Bush-era (and onward) policies about surveillance by wiretapping and other means, has landed at an interesting place: she's just become a part of the small board at Dropbox. TechDirt calls the appointment "tone deaf," and writes "At a time when people around the globe are increasingly worried about American tech firms having too close a connection to the intelligence community, a move like this seems like a huge public relations disaster. While Rice may be perfectly qualified to hold the role and to help Dropbox with the issues it needs help with, it's hard not to believe that there would be others with less baggage who could handle the job just as well."
Some people are doing more than looking for an alternative for themselves, too, as a result.

There are quite a few rumors / gossip she is gay or in a lesbian relationship herself. She couldn't break with Bush's anti-gay agenda but she advocated respect and has come out in favor of civil unions. So consider he mildly supportive of gay rights and not bad at all for a Republican.

Anyone that thought the Iraq War was a good idea, should not be described as "pretty sharp". There is a saying that 'Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good.' Condoleezza Rice is proof that we have moved past that. She is female (and black), and promoted to the highest levels, despite the failure of nearly all her policies. She is proof that you no longer have to be male to be both successful and incompetent.

It was good for Iraq since Saddam and his brutality are done and Iraq is now a functioning if troubled democracy. As a bonus the cost was less than Saddam's long term average of death and destruction, and that is now ended. And it also meant no more oil for food money being diverted to build palaces and buy weapons but instead is going to benefit the Iraqi people.

It was also good for Europe since many European countries got either oil or construction contracts from Iraq.

Hey, Saddam was know to kill up to 3 people a year! So what if a hundred thousand of his people died, and Al-Queda was able to move in to a country previously unavailable to them to begin killing locals. So long as those 3 people were saved! And my Halliburton stocks paid nice dividends.

I think that anyone, regardless of race, creed, religion, etc, will always have a job publicly supporting the existing power structure.

Isn't that an amazing step forward in egalitarianism? Such a short time ago, someone like her would never have been accepted, no matter what her political views. Pretty cool, eh? Nah, just kidding. Let's keep blaming everything on "white men" LOLZ

The objective of the war was to destroy Iraq's WMDs. The things you listed were made-up-after-the-fact justifications.

Prior to the war, we had three goals:

1. A united Iraq2. A secular Iraq3. An Iraq opposed to Iranian influence.

These were also the goals of Saddam Hussein. They are NOT the goals of the current government of Iraq, which has pretty much the opposite goals (for instance, they are supporting the Assad regime in Syria).

The objective of the war was to destroy Iraq's WMDs. The things you listed were made-up-after-the-fact justifications.

That was never the goal. That was the BS propaganda. Don't believe everything^W anything you see on the news. We didn't even hear the term "WMD" until Blair said that the UK wouldn't join us without a UN mandate.

The UN resolution that served as the peace treaty that ended the first Gulf War included a requirement that Saddam destroy all his WMDs and provide proof that he had done so. That proof hadn't been provided, so, bingo, pretext for war. Whether Iraq actually had any WMDs was only relevant to ginning up emotional support: the propaganda mill. It was never actually important.

BTW, it's no more important that Iraq have pro-American policies than that France does. Democracies are more open to trade and less open to war, so we benefit regardless. It's far easier for a dictator to find purely personal gain in expanding his territory regardless of sanctions, as we see in Ukraine now, for example.

Democracies are more open to trade and less open to war, so we benefit regardless. It's far easier for a dictator to find purely personal gain in expanding his territory regardless of sanctions, as we see in Ukraine now, for example.

Except the country that invaded Ukraine was Russia, and Russia is a democracy. It doesn't become "not a democracy" just because you don't like the guy they elected. Putin was reelected with a much bigger margin than Obama, and has sky high approval ratings.

She's also just a board member. They rarely make any decisions regarding company policies or products. Instead the board is there to make sure they get paid, that the company's executives are held accountable to them, and so forth. The board is essentially the company's owners or representatives of the owners.

99% of the users of Dropbox will not care and for a large number of potential users she will provide sense of legitimacy.Goodbye paranoid trouble makers that use the free service, hello companies that pay for the service.I fear that some members of the tech crowd think they have more power than they really do,

That may not be truthful. There's a consensus building that she and her allies genuinely believed in their policy. That doesn't speak well for her competence but at least her integrity isn't under as great a scrutiny.

So, it's an old familiar foe called Ignorance that we keep on fighting, instead of some malevolent conspiracy.

No, even Downing Street knew that the whole justification for the invasion was crap, if you remember they complained internally that "the intelligence is being fixed". Blatant falsification of data, deliberate sabotage of the WMD inspections (IIRC they were 97% complete when the US told inspectors they had to leave immediately because bombing was about to start), illegal propaganda operations targeting the US public, the whole run-up to the war was founded on lies that were exposed in the foreign press but knowingly redistributed by the US media. There may be "a consensus building", but joining that group will require deliberately forgetting everything that was actually going on at the time in favor of historical revisionism.

Quick, let's boycott Dropbox so we can force her out of the company. Then after we've succeeded we can have a another Slashdot story lamenting how intolerant we've all become and we can point fingers at everyone else.

I'm not going to 'boycott' them, but I am going to stop using them, and I now no longer care who they have on their board.

I am disconnecting anything which I have which still points to DropBox since I haven't used it in a while anyway.

But for a company which does cloud storage to expect that people won't look at that appointment and say "oh hell no", they're sadly mistaken. You might as well appoint Alberto Gonzales as a Constitutional scholar and privacy expert.

I'm betting they see a very small drop in usage/users. I'm going to pick a random percent out of my ass and guess that less than 10% of Dropbox users will even know about her getting on the board and of that a very small % will care enough to drop the service.

But I'm just making a wild guess and have nothing to base my numbers on.

What the fuck does this have to do with tolerance. Why would I want someone who supports the Patriot Act, NSA, TSA, basically everything big brotherish to sit on the board of a cloud based storage company. That basically says to me that I should expect that the data will be sold to the highest bidder and I have no privacy.

If Brendan Eich could be forced out for a $1,000 donation, surely Ms. Rice can be for influencing privacy policy herself, something which is highly relevant to this business. In addition, she has defended her position since leaving office.
I think the real question here is where does this end?

She was the provost of Stanford University, she's got a huge rolodex in government and SillyCon Valley. She's also obviously got a big background in IR and particularly working with Russia and Africa, which are both huge growth markets for Internet companies.

Her biggest crime was not asking all the right questions, and didn't have to swag necessary to challenge Cheney or Rumsfeld, not that she was particularly motivated. She's proven to be a pretty bad administrator and manager, but she's going on the Board, not into management.

She was intimately involved in the decision to go to war with Iraq and spoke publicly in support of it.

She was an integral part of the Bush administration's campaign of lies surrounding the war, working to further public support of the war by lying about Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction.

Rice played a central role in affirming the "legality" of the Bush administration's torture program.

Rice not only spoke in favor of the Bush administration's warrantless wiretap program and expansive domestic surveillance program, she authorized the warrantless wiretap of UN Security Council members.

But you keep thinking that a extremely brilliant and accomplished individual, having obtained her Masters degree at age 20, isn't smart enough to ask the right questions or able to go toe to toe with Cheney or Rumsfeld....

But you keep thinking that a extremely brilliant and accomplished individual, having obtained her Masters degree at age 20, isn't smart enough to ask the right questions or able to go toe to toe with Cheney or Rumsfeld....

The problem is that, while she is smart, she is also ideological.

If her ideology conflicts with the facts, the ideology wins.

Not only was she NOT willing to ask question, she WAS willing to give press interviews with WRONG information. Because that WRONG information suited her ideology. Even though it would cost lives.

NOT the kind of person YOU want on the Board of Directors of a company tasked with providing access to YOUR data.

She didn't care enough about the lives that would be lost to ask any questions. And she cared so little for those lives that she provided wrong information to support the drive to war. Do you think that your DATA will mean more to her than that?

That is not quite true. To simplify, she was a neocon who was overconfident of what US military force could do. That would put her on the side of Dick Cheney, but on the opposite side of Rumsfeld and Powell who were urging caution.

I will second you point on that she is very sharp but that her management of the state department was subpar.

US military did the job, the problem goes back to the post invasion policies as defined by Paul Bremer which made things worse. Had we used de-nazification policies on the Baath party, the insurgency would have been much more limited. Remember, even in post-WW2 germany, 4-5k soldiers died to German partisans (aka insurgents).

Maybe – hindsight is 20/20. Everybody believed that the US would win the initial ground war. The long game was a different matter. My point is that the neocons felt that a small military force could rapidly democratize Iraq – that the population was yearning for a western democratic system. Some neocons where talking about probably regime change in Syria and Iran within a few years. Widely optimistic.

From what I have read about counter insurgency / pacification, it takes large committed force ye

I've said this before, the US Military does obliterating an opposing force quite well. Which serves well when the objective is the liberation of a territory from hostile occupation, where the US can go in, win, and then the local populace can quickly get things back the way it was. It does not do occupation very well nor really has outside of the Wester Hemisphere.

The exception being post World War II with the Marshal Plan. Which planning for that began in 1943 and by 1945 the government had managed to twist the arms of a lot of academics, economists, finance, and high ranking industry officials to spend two years post war to help rebuild western Europe.

She gave speeches strongly advocating war in Iraq, and was an integral part of the whole process that led to a war which killed over 100,000 people. It was later solidly established that the people at the very top of the Bush administration knew their excuses for war were BS and kept repeating them anyway, and ignoring all the evidence that they were wrong.

I keep reading about how intelligent this woman is. But given the things she's done, she sounds pretty goddamn dumb to me. It's not everyone who can say

...we must not let the next warning from ShareFiles.com be a smoking gun in the shape of a mushroom cloud!We must send our youngest interns to effect regime change on their board!Thank you, and God Bless Dropbox!

Let's say Republican Senator Susan Collins took this position instead. Then: No issue and no uproar.

The problem is not that Rice is a Republican, it's that she was a part of the most terrifying Republican administration in history, and oversaw defense of torture and mass-surveillance wiretapping programs.

it's that she was a part of the most terrifying Republican administration in history, and oversaw defense of torture and mass-surveillance wiretapping programs.

So if she had been part of the most terrifying Democrat administration in history, it would be ok?

To be clear, I consider both parties to be clowns. They are mostly all friends and laugh at all the hardcore party partisans that get all worked up and think it's real. It's just like pro wrestling. You're just a mark.

I hope you consider the Obama admin one of the most terrifying Democratic admins in history then as they oversaw defense of drone assassinations and much more expanded mass-surveillance. Lets add in gun-running to mexico, getting our ambassador to Libya and 3 others dead and then lying about it, enacting policies that encourage the militarization of local police, etc. Of course it takes a lot to surpass the Woodrow Wilson admin with their arresting journalists and shutting down newspapers that were their

I was trying to figure out why people would say that she's connected to the NSA. I was wondering if they'd say that about anyone who served in the White House (Al Gore is on Apple's board). I guess to people subscribing to a team mentality, any member of the republican leadership must be working to promote the NSA, and all the brave democrats are fighting against it.

But in reality, it's pretty silly to think that she's going to advocate turning over all their data to the NSA just because she's on their boar

I think if James Clapper or Keith Alexander joined the board of DropBox you'd see the same issues. But they haven't.

Being a donor to one of two political choices (or often both) is one thing. That's very, very far removed from power. Actually having started wars whilst being Secretary of State is entirely different.

Facebook changing THEIR privacy policy directly affects users. The outcry is justified and has nothing to do with the politics of their CEO or board. This issue is entirely different. People are calling for boycotts and pressure because a perfectly capable board member used to work for the Bush administration which started a wiretapping program. It has NOTHING to do with what she personally has done nor what she has done as a board member of the Dropbox company.

“I don’t ever want anybody to be denied rights within our country. I happen to think marriage is between a man and a woman. That’s tradition, and I believe that that’s the right answer. But perhaps we will decide that there needs to be some way for people to express their desire to live together through civil union.”

Condoleezza Rice — Dec. 20, 2010

I guess websites will have to protest and such and then she'll resign after 2 weeks right?

Did she supported any bills that were discriminatory? If yes, then I would say that she deserves the same backslash as Mr. Eich. Of course, it's not to be to decide but from the homosexual community. From the short quote I can't decide, because same-sex marriage was never about the marriage itself but the recognition of the union from the government. Basically, I would agree with Rice on this particular quote.

Lets see what the quote says:"I don’t ever want anybody to be denied rights within our countr

You know anyone who is stupid enough to use cloud storage for securing data even after seeing the company hire someone who supported the patriot act, tsa, nsa, torture, etc is really not going to care about stance on gay marriage.

Well, no, because that's not really a position of hate now is it? She's haggling over the meaning of the term "marriage" but ultimately is in favor of same sex couples to have the same rights that heterosexual couples have. She states it twice, "I donâ(TM)t ever want anybody to be denied rights within our country" and "perhaps we will decide that there needs to be some way for people to express their desire to live together through civil union" in the the four se

She is sharp and well-connected but I hope that this does not undermine Dropbox. I know I never trusted Dropbox from the very beginning and this is giving me even more reason not to trust them. Does this mean that government has an in road to easier spying? Only time will tell....

It's not that using Dropbox is now a bad idea because Rice is on the board.... It's that using any "Cloud Based Storage" is not a good idea. Savvy readers can probably already setup and host their own servers... Why do you want to risk your data to someone else who does it "for free"?

For non-savvy users: I recommend Tresorit [tresorit.com]. I really like the interface, and they seem to have security as one of their primary focuses. Everything you store on Tresorit is encrypted before it leaves your computer / device.

For more savvy users: SpiderOak [spideroak.com]. Its interface is... more than a little bit convoluted. But it's got all the same security and encryption that I like about Tresorit, plus file versioning and a web interface.

Anyone remember the Race Draft skit on The Chappelle Show? The whites wanted to draft Colon Powell as 100% white but the blacks would only allow it if they also agreed to take Condaleeza Rice. She wasn't real popular back then either apparently.

Really? National Security Advisor who supports wire tapping sitting on the board for a cloud based storage solution company. Could your post be code for stupid.

Revolving door of business and government. Having her on board increases the probability that if the Republicans gain the Senate this year, or the Presidency in 2016, the government will "encourage" its subcontractors to use Dropbox, or adopt Dropbox itself. Even if they don't, Republican-sympathetic nation states (vs. Democratically-sympathetic na

A conservative is incapable of understanding what racism means. Seriously. Ask them to define it and they get a convoluted bundle of CRAP.

Only a conservative would fail to understand concerns about someone who pushed the Patriot Act to the hilt as NSA adviser is 'racist.'

It's most liberals that don't know what racism is. They sceam "racism" if someone mentions islamic terrorists. They think it's great to hire someone just because they're a minority even if they're under qualified and ignore white males when they are qualified. They don't see Affirmative Action as inherently racist, even though it's based totally on race. And they certainly love to say and do racist things about black and latino/hispanic conservatives, but throw a complete fit if a conservative says anyt

Yeah, that's not racist, just stupid. Why should you have pride in something that's not an accomplishment (except for the late Michael, I guess)? And, if you don't believe your skin tone to be superior in any way, how would pride even enter the equation? I take my initial comment back: having pride on your race, whatever it is, is both racist and stupid.

A conservative is incapable of understanding what racism means. Seriously. Ask them to define it and they get a convoluted bundle of CRAP.

Conservative: racism is discriminating based on race. For example, college admissions are racist if they use different requirements for different races.

Liberal: racism is the absence of penalizing whites. For example, college admissions aren't racist as long as they penalizes whites; if they penalize Asians more than whites, that's still not racism, since whites are still penalized in some way.

Both are simple: one seeks equality at the start of the process, the other equality at the end of the process, and both think the other hates equality, like almost everything else in the conservative/liberal divide.

"Big-L Libertarians" are a bunch of crazies, from all over the left-right spectrum (thus the two axes model). But mainstream conservative though is very much aligned with "classic liberalism" now - empowering individual liberty - while the mainstream left seems to value doing things for the benefit of the collective, "collective rights" (fuck you Justice Breyer [scotusblog.com], and the like. So "small-L libertarians", sure.

But that's just another way of saying "equality of opportunity vs equality of outcome".

I'd have an easier time believing in "equality of opportunity" again if economic power were more evenly distributed. Unless you're telling me a lower-class kid from the ghetto, a middle-class kid from the 'burbs, and an upper-class kid from whatever upper-class enclave you wish to name all have the same "equality of opportunity". From my vantage point, the first has opportunity of jail or long-term unemployment and welfare, the second lifelong debt and wage slavery (until about age 50, where they slide down